GNet Solutions » GNU/Linux Administration

I encountered a problem during my installation of Lubuntu. The setup involves leaving a NTFS partition with a stock Windows installation, with its bootloader untouched, then an extended partition is created with two logical partitions, one for OS and one for home directory. The second OS environment will boot from a USB drive, with a 128MB ext4 partition at the beginning of the drive for the /boot partition. The problem that kept occurring was an I/O error right after I assigned the partition location and bootloader location. I went though a number of solutions right down to completely zeroing just the second OS partitions and recreating new ext4 filesystems.

The actual problem was that I was trying to assign the bootloader to the first partition on the USB drive, which was /boot partition. This is incorrect for installing the bootloader, I had to set the bootloader device to the USB device and not the partition. Once the correct device was selected for the bootloader to be installed, the rest of the installation finished successfully.